


Kirkos

by TrivialPursuit



Category: The Avengers (2012), The Night Circus, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Circus, Gen, circus AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-06
Updated: 2013-04-06
Packaged: 2017-12-07 10:21:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/747412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrivialPursuit/pseuds/TrivialPursuit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zirkus der Träume they call themselves in Germany (In Italy they're Il Circo dei Sogni and France Le Cirque des Rêves.).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Spider

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She flies high above the spectators, red ribbons twisting around her like a puppet on strings.

She flies high above the spectators, red ribbons twisting around her like a puppet on strings, dropping and raising her. It creates an odd sort of paradox; she is entirely at the mercy of the ribbons, if they break she will die, but the ribbons are under her control, to be manipulated like a skilled puppeteer.

She was raised by Russian circus folk, her parents were Tzigits who'd died in a terrible accident, or maybe her mother was a Romani fortune teller who'd fallen in love with a Gaffer and had his lovechild than died of consumption, the love of her life having been torn brutally away from her, or maybe they were Flatties who'd abandon their unwanted baby to a pack of Didicoy the first chance they got. It doesn't matter really though, does it? She likes to imagine they were good people with good reasons but chances are they probably weren't.

She is a spider, spinning her web around the heavens of the tent in which she performs. She is so small to the people on the ground, people who have no idea what freedom feels like. They think she dances for them, but really only the opposite is true. She weaves her web, trapping them with red ribbons and black silk costumes.

She was taken in and trained by Ivan, the circus's primary aerialist, who taught her the wonders of flying high above the crowds, the artistry of the trapeze, how to hold your wrist for the perfect Schtrabat, the delicate balance of the Corde Volante, how to flick your arm to perfectly accentuate you as you sweeps through the air.

These common people ooh and ah, amazed by the things that to her are a second nature. They are hypnotized by her pendulum-like movement through the air as she wraps and unwraps herself in ribbons.

She leaves the Moscow State Circus when she turns fifteen. They have been good to her but the circus has folded under the disappearance of the circus. Once they were the people's entertainment and now they can barely feed themselves, let alone the masses of the poor starved for an escape. She is picked up by an circus travelling through Germany. Zirkus der Träume they call themselves in Germany (In Italy they're Il Circo dei Sogni and France Le Cirque des Rêves.). They travel across the violent, vicious parts of the world, bringing joy through clowns and circuses. She meets people, good people, people who put on masks to make others smile and laugh (She does not want to see their real faces.)

Sometimes, if she is feeling particularly morbid she lets go of her ribbons and falls towards the earth, executing the Schtrabat she was first taught all those years ago but lets herself fall, not reaching out for a safety line or ribbon until, just as her feet dance on the heads of her captive audience a hidden line in the neck of her costume, jerking her to a stop and as she does a theatrical inverted bow. (Sometimes she wonders what would happen if she forgot to hook on her line.)

She is a spider forever and always.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Natasha uses a combination of British and European circus slang that may or may not be correct.  
> Circus slang comes from http://www.goodmagic.com/carny/ and is as follows:
> 
> Tzigits- Russian word for "Mongol horseman," an act displaying spectacular Caucasian and Cossack horsemanship. Also called "Cossack vaulting." At a gallop, riders somersaulting from the ground to the saddle, hang alongside or underneath the horse, etc.  
> Gaffer-A gentleman, or the boss.  
> Flatties-Non-circus people.  
> Didicoy-Fairground folk.  
> Schtrabat-The showy climax of some aerial acrobatic acts, where an aerialist lets himself "miss" the support the audience expected him to catch, and instead catches the safety rod at the last moment or is saved by a cord attached to his catcher's hands.


	2. Ouranomancy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Other fortune tellers tell their querents lies but she tries to tell them the truth.

They are small things, the changes that lay forth whole world at her fingertips. Her grandmother taught her how. Her mother would always scoff and sneer, calling Granny a charlatan, little better than a thief, yet she believes and Granny would smile indulgently and say that Mommy didn't have the imagination for reading that she and Granny have (Though she was always able to detect a slight tightening of sadness around her grandmother's eyes).

She learns the names; Orion, Andromeda, Cygnus, Hydra, Bellatrix, Alphard, Sirius, Algol, the mythologies. She flirts with becoming an astrophysicist for a while before Granny dies and suddenly Mom can't support her anymore (She was forced to drop out of school when she was seventeen to take a job like every other girl in this godforsaken town so a scholarship was completely out of the question.). A few weeks after the funeral a circus comes to town and she asks if they have a fortune teller, and it turns out she died last year and they simply hadn't gotten around to replacing her. So she packs up her clothes and the tarot deck Granny left her, writes her mother a note and joins the circus. 

She takes the name Madame Urania after the Greek Muse of Astronomy and sits in a little tent reading palms and cards. Occasionally, if she feels right, she'll pull out a set of silver stars and scatter them across the blue velvet tablecloth and do her readings from that. Though the results are often harder to decipher but some how leave her more satisfied than tarot or palm reading ever could.

Sometimes they cry, hold her hands, and it makes her feel like a fraud, but she's not a fraud (or maybe she is, who knows?). It makes her feel cheap, like a whore taking money from people who've put their faith in her. She takes so much from them, their names, stories, money, the strange little bits of one's soul that people are inexplicably willing to give up to a total stranger. She finds it odd, what people will tell her; that their daughter loved A Tale of Two Cities, that their brother could dance like a Cossack, that their mother hated coffee. It's these odd little personal bits of their should that people give to her to safeguard against the erosive effects of time upon the memory. If they ever loose these little pieces of the ones they love from their own minds they can come to her and reclaim lost memories of halcyon day.

When she was little Granny used to cover her head with one of those Gypsy scarves and tie a long silk shawl around her shoulders and tell her that she would one day be the Queen's High Clairvoyant. She would be great and glorious, the Gypsy Queen of the Stars. 

Other fortune tellers tell their querents lies but she tries to tell them the truth. Or at least her truth, the truth that she sees in them. She hopes that whatever she tells each person true, or becomes true, though she's never had a repeat customer to be able to find out. So maybe it is the truth, if only to her. And maybe that's all that counts.


End file.
